I’ll preface this by saying I hate musk as much as the rest of us.
But reusable rockets have better uses than deploying satellites. If a large space station/docking station/transport hub is built in higher orbit, reusable rockets could carry cargo to/from Earth’s surface.
Slight tangent:
They can be designed better to reduce chemical fuel consumption. Like a 5-phased operation: takeoff->ramjet->scramjet to get reach hypersonic speeds in the upper atmosphere -> then only using enough rocket fuel for orbital insertion -> finally changing to ion thrusters to reach the higher levels of orbit.
Instead of just straight burning rocket fuel from surface to upper orbit, let alone to the moon and back.
Stage two could involve using solar sails to travel from the Earth’s upper-orbit transport hub to a similar hub located at a Lagrange point in lunar orbit. (This is optimized around the full moon; return voyages would be optimized around the new moon, when the earth is “downwind” from the sun and moon).
Stage three would be from lunar orbit station to lunar surface; a simple lander can handle this pretty efficiently. This eliminates the need to carry lunar landers to/from earth on every voyage.
Expansion:
Similar systems could apply for interplanetary transit (eventually), but the solar sails might only work one-way for those (returning from venus/mercury, or going out to mars/jupiter/saturn); so another solution would need to be engineered for the other leg of those journeys.
I’ll preface this by saying I hate musk as much as the rest of us.
But reusable rockets have better uses than deploying satellites. If a large space station/docking station/transport hub is built in higher orbit, reusable rockets could carry cargo to/from Earth’s surface.
Slight tangent:
They can be designed better to reduce chemical fuel consumption. Like a 5-phased operation: takeoff->ramjet->scramjet to get reach hypersonic speeds in the upper atmosphere -> then only using enough rocket fuel for orbital insertion -> finally changing to ion thrusters to reach the higher levels of orbit.
Instead of just straight burning rocket fuel from surface to upper orbit, let alone to the moon and back.
Stage two could involve using solar sails to travel from the Earth’s upper-orbit transport hub to a similar hub located at a Lagrange point in lunar orbit. (This is optimized around the full moon; return voyages would be optimized around the new moon, when the earth is “downwind” from the sun and moon).
Stage three would be from lunar orbit station to lunar surface; a simple lander can handle this pretty efficiently. This eliminates the need to carry lunar landers to/from earth on every voyage.
Expansion:
Similar systems could apply for interplanetary transit (eventually), but the solar sails might only work one-way for those (returning from venus/mercury, or going out to mars/jupiter/saturn); so another solution would need to be engineered for the other leg of those journeys.